Bandolero, my hotel - taking it day-by-day: October 2007

23 October 2007

Back in early September, we had a group of painters here for 7 nights from Edinburgh. The same group organiser, Nicky, was here last year as well and she has booked in for three more weeks next year doing various things including a wine tasting week.

At the end of September, the Americans started arriving creating a busy first three weeks of October. Our first group was mainly from Texas although there were a couple of folks from Oregon. The second group was from various locations including Oregon, California, Washington DC, Colorado and Vermont. The instructors, Maggie and Bill, are from New Mexico, same as last year.

The first group was slightly larger than the second one so I had organised bus transportation for them with a driver but with the second group, being a bit smaller, I was the driver. With the second group, I managed to get a bit of painting time in as well, my first attempt at pastel painting. Maggie wanted to show me how to get started with pastels and I have a copy of her recently published book as well ("Painting with Pastels") which is written for those with little to no experience in pastels. I also have plenty of pastels to experiment with as I inherited them from my Mom who was quite accomplished in pastels.

So we travelled around the area painting white villages, distant valleys and mountains, rooftops, churches, trees, clouds, my hotel and other subjects. All appeared quite content with the area for subjects and of course all were happy with Ivan´s cooking at the end of each day. He dazzled them on the final night of each workshop with a medley of tapas and then one of his delicious desserts.

We been quite busy all in all since my return from NY in early August. We still got bookings through early November and into January already. This is not counting the booked weekend for the upcoming workshops next year. If you´d like more info on those workshops, please go to my Theme Holidays page for details at
http://www.hotelbandolero.com/themes/home-eng .

Something new, we are now offering Wine Tasting weekends. We have a package deal on offer currently for two nights in the hotel on a Half-board basis including a lunch in Ronda after a visit to one of Ronda´s fantastic local vineyards, a wine tasting of local Ronda wines and regional Spanish wines lead by our local sommilier, Paula McLean, a marriage of wines and food instruction at dinner in the hotel as well as a seminar on the art of Spanish hams, curing and the art of slicing `provided by a Spanish national champion based in Ronda. All in all, quite a good package, now all we need are some punters to take up the offer.

We´re still working on getting our own swimming pool built but that project moves slowly ahead, something like an ice berg floating along in the sea. Our architect needs to make a couple of revisions to the plan he´s already prepared and he is the one slowing everything down and his has quite a reputation for being that slow, unfortunately for us. I would really lover to have that pool ready for just after Easter which is arriving early next year. so that would mean it would be open for April.

We are also putting our house up for sale so if there are any punter interested in buying a house in Júzcar, just give us a quick ring. the idea of selling the house materialised back in May. Why do we want to sell the house you wonder? Well it has everything to do with monthly mortgage payments... the interest rate has gone no where but up since we first bought the house and since we have a variable rate, our payments have risen along with it and I would just love to put those funds to better use than in a house that we really only sleep in. We have sufficient space in the hotel to create an owner´s apartment, in fact, I think we would have more space in the hotel than what we have in the house so it is going on the market officially in the coming days. We´ve already spoken with an estate agent in Ronda to sell it and so if you´re interested in viewing the photos, I´ll post here the details of where to find the listing so you can have a look for anyone interested in having a lovely house in Júzcar.

There are quite a few things happening in the village of late as well. At the moment, there are road works in front of Bar Torrechelli´s where the town is installing new pipes for sewage. The new village street lamps are still going in, that project was started in early May and does not appear to be making any headway toward getting it finished anytime soon, but ah, that´s how things happen here in Júzcar, perhaps all of Málaga interior in fact. The lamp posts are now standing in place but do not have actual lamps on them, they are just the posts. In fact, this new sewage project seems to be moving along at a faster pace than the lamp project and it only started a week or so ago, so that is very fast in relative terms for Júzcar. Maybe that project will be completed before Christmas. I think it may have priority over the others because there is a road detour and no one seems to be able to read or under stand signs; I know this because the detour is in front of the hotel and many that sees it, stop their car to come in and ask me or Ivan how to get through the village, even though there are these signs with arrows pointing which way to go. Go figure, I guess people are so used to signs that lead to no where that they would rather check with a real person first before driving down a road that may wind up being too narrow for their car to pass through (I had an experience like that in Genalguácil and boy did it ever stress me out!!).

Another big step forward made here recently is that we in the hotel now have wireless available. In fact, I am writing this blog entry on my new laptop and I am standing in the breakfast dining room doing so while Ivan is working in front of me on his new bandolera statue made of paper maché to be a companion to our bandolero. We now have a second PC available for our clients in the salon to access their emails and check the weather and look for their next accommodation, etc. And for those who are very techie advanced and travel with their own laptops, they can hook into my wifi network, which is password protected. I must add all this info to my website to alert the travelling public about another advantage to staying at Hotel Bandolero.

I also now have my website available in Dutch, thanks to the translations provided to me by my good Dutch friend, Edwin. Dutch is the last language that I am adding to the site and this is due to the high volume of clients that come from either the Netherlands or Belgium, keep on coming!!

We´ve also recently added a new double bed to one of the Suites and we are told it is quite comfortable. I have therefore added the other existing double bed to one of the double rooms and now only need to get one more new double bed for the other suite and a new mattress for the existing double bed.

We´ve also changed our cleaning help recently. That was due to her, Maria, deciding to take on other work, not bothering to tell us about it, and then showing up late for work here all the time, all at the time that the hotel was full of guests. when I asked her about it, the first thing out of her mouth was, well if you want to get someone else, go ahead. That was something the Spanish would say was "sin vergüenza", no shame. We thought she was our best employee, we were quite happy with her work, quality of work and attitude... until this happened (after 3 years) and she could not be bothered to give us the courtesy of telling us what was happening with her. Very disappointing behavior but symptomatic of the attitude people here have toward work... if they can get out of working and still get paid, they are done in a NY minute. She informed us after our asking that she got a contract with this program from the Junta de Andalucia which pays 600€ a month for only 15 days of work and then the remainder of the month free. So why would anyone want to work for private enterprise and have to bust a gut when they can work for a couple of weeks, get the same amount of money or more and have lots of free time? It is a program provided by the government which does nothing to promote private enterprise and growth of new work for the people. The people just don´t care as long as they can go and party when they want... that mañana attitude which Iván tells me is typical of Andalucia, not all of Spain but only here in the south. And no wonder when the regional government does nothing to make the people help themselves, maintaining programs from Franco´s days when Spain was still a poor southern European nation... absolutely not the case today!! So now we have Toñi on a full-time basis... she was with us a year a go but left to run her own bar which in the end she decided was not worth the amount of hours she had to put in (7AM to 11PM, way too many hours). She was very happy when we offered her a spot back here and then to take up the cleaning role more fully, she works with a smile and actually speask to our clients which Maria did not do.

Next weekend, we have a couple of friends from London coming to spend the weekend in Júzcar with parents as well from Florida which will be quite nice. And then we have a busy holiday weekend the following week as 1st November is a national holiday in Spain.

I have some other work to catch up with now so I have to say hasta la proxima. I must try to get the next blog entry done sometime next week but in the meantime, I have left quite a bit here for you all to read.

Tuesday, 23 October 2007

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